Education is Key to Achieving Sustainability in a Rapidly Changing World

If we want people in India to care about the world around us and our fellow citizens, we need to educate them. Currently, our educational system is mostly preparing students to perform a specific task and fulfill social functions. This system is old-fashioned and was modeled on how our world looked over a hundred years ago. In this day and age, our world is changing fast due to manufacturing outputs to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding population.

In India only, we have over 1.3 billion people, all of us have a small impact on the environment, together we have a huge impact on the world around us. It’s time to take responsibility, and this starts with information and education.

  Sustainability Doesn’t Only Concern the Environment

 Companies especially need to take a huge corporate responsibility to curb negative social impact. As products and services are easily accessible, it’s easier for consumers to consume these products and services. In some cases, this may lead to exaggerated behavior where the consumers over-indulges and create problems for themselves. Corporate social responsibility (CRS) is essential, both for business sustainability and to have a sustainable society where risks and harmful behaviors are minimized.

The progress around regulating the commercial industry is well underway, where lawmakers and businesses work together to form policies and laws that protect our citizens. The process of educating businesses is more straightforward compared to educating millions and millions of individual private persons.

  It Starts in School

 Yours and our activity is the most critical factor which determines the future. The annual growth rate of India’s population is 1%. This means that every year our community grows with 13,540,000 new people. Remember that this number grows each year, the 1% may remain constant, but the actual population compounds and the numbers of new people will increase on an annual basis. The population growth and our materialistic ways have a critical effect on the climate. We are facing a climate change which will come with catastrophic results as the situation gets worse.

Climate change education is essential in order to build a society that is flexible and adaptive. In order to become an adaptable society, we need to clarify the goal of education and ideals and principles around the pursuit of sustainability. To achieve this, us Indian need to come together and create stories of “us” that nourish the communal spirit and unites us towards a common goal as we approach an uncertain future. We need to become more emphatic citizens that practice practical thinking and become practical when it comes to taking care of the world around us.